America is throwing a big birthday party for its 16th president, and everyone wants a share

ILLINOIS has been calling itself “the land of Lincoln” for decades. This week the entire country is laying claim to the title. Every place with a significant connection to the great man, from Louisville, Kentucky, the largest city in the state where he was born, to Springfield, Illinois, where he made his career in law and politics, to Gettysburg, on whose battlefield he delivered his immortal address, is marking the 200th anniversary of his birth. In Washington, DC, Congress is holding a bicameral tribute; the refurbished Ford's Theatre, where he was assassinated, is reopening with a new play about Lincoln's life; and the Library of Congress is unveiling an exhibition of Lincoln memorabilia.

Lincoln is one of the world's most written-about men, along with Napoleon and Jesus, with 16,000 books on him written since his death in 1865 and a new Lincoln book coming out, on average, every week. But in this bicentennial year a flood is turning into a torrent. More than 60 Lincoln-themed books are being published to mark the bicentennial month, and Michael Burlingame's 1m-word biography is about to go online.

Such Lincolnmania is hardly surprising. For all its claims to youth and energy, America is a history-obsessed country, with books on the founding and the civil war earning a permanent place, along with self-help books, on the bestseller lists. Lincoln is arguably America's greatest president (Washington, the other obvious claimant to the title, is regarded more as a god than a man). Lincoln's 200th birthday is also following hard on the heels of the inauguration of America's first black president, a man who is married to a woman whose ancestors were traded like cattle in Lincoln's time.

But a cause of national celebration is also, inevitably, an excuse for partisan manoeuvring. Barack Obama has made a concerted attempt to present himself as a latter-day Lincoln, keeping a portrait of the martyred president on his desk and taking his oath of office on Lincoln's Bible. He referred to Lincoln in the speech in Springfield that launched his election campaign, in the victory speech in Chicago that ended it, and in his inaugural address, which he devoted to the subject of “a new birth of freedom”. The new president travelled to Springfield this week to celebrate Lincoln's birthday.

Some of this is nothing more than innocent, if irritating, grandiosity. The comparisons between the two Illinois politicians are, after all, striking. “In Lincoln's rise from poverty”, Mr Obama wrote in Time in 2005, “his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all this, he reminded me…of my own struggles,” prompting Peggy Noonan, a conservative commentator, to quip that Mr Obama is “like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better.” But there is also a good deal of calculation.

Much of it reflects the Democrats' conviction that they, rather than the Republicans, are the real “party of Lincoln”. The Republicans' most solid base these days is in the states that once formed the Confederacy that fought to preserve slavery; the Democrats now control almost all the Union states, including Illinois. The Democrats also regard themselves as the champions of other marginalised groups, from Latinos to homosexuals.

The Republicans are belatedly pushing back. Earlier this month, during the opening rounds of the election for their new party chairman, all the candidates, without exception, named Ronald Reagan as their favourite president. But when it became clear that the party was about to elect its first black boss, Michael Steele, it rediscovered its inner Abe. Kenneth Blackwell, another black candidate, endorsed Mr Steele by urging the party to make good “on the promise of Lincoln”. Mr Steele described his victory as “one more bold step that the party of Lincoln has taken”.

So who can really claim Lincoln's mantle? In some ways, both sides can. Both parties embrace Lincoln's vision of America as a model of democratic government to the world, and both want to be more inclusive. The Republicans do appear to understand that they cannot survive as the party of white southern voters. Mr Bush appointed more members of minorities to his administration than any previous president, including two black secretaries of state in a row. Mr Steele's election is a sign of the party's continuing commitment to expanding its base.

The forgotten meritocrat

But, in other ways, both sides have shortchanged one of Lincoln's most important ideals: that of self-help and upward mobility. Lincoln was not just content to be a personal example of upward mobility—born, in the poet James Russell Lowell's phrase, “out of the very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown”. He believed that the essence of the promise of American life was “to lift artificial weights from all shoulders” and “afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

Both parties continue to pay lip service to this ideal. But they have done far too little about America's rusting ladders of opportunity. Mr Bush's Republicans cut the top rates of tax at a time when the richest Americans were amassing unheard-of wealth, and widened the gap between rich and poor while turning a healthy budget surplus into a big deficit. The Democrats are wedded to a system of affirmative action that judges people on the basis of their race rather than their individual merits. They are also in the pockets of teachers' unions which have fought relentlessly against introducing more competition or standardised testing into the public schools. Mr Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has sent his own children to a private school, Sidwell Friends, while simultaneously anathematising voucher schemes that would allow those less wealthy to do the same. If the hottest political question in this bicentennial week is “what would Lincoln do?”, then the first answer is surely try a lot harder to repair America's faltering commitment to meritocracy.